For Earth Day, BAS On The Fresh Minty Flavor Of Greenwashing In 2021
She looks to be about 12 or 13 as she smiles behind her safety glasses. In her hardhat, she confidently walks towards me as an oil-burning power plant blows up behind her. And ten seconds into the commercial she’s telling me how Florida Power & Light “made way for clean American-made ‘natural’ gas.” But don’t fret—many solar panels are shown, and I get to learn about how so-called green hydrogen will allow Florida Power & Light to “just grab some sun, add water, and there … cleaner energy for all of us!” The commercial, which airs frequently in Florida’s major television markets, is wafer-thin on details. It ends with the young girl sitting behind her parents in a Tesla, tugging at my heartstrings when she reminds me that her generation “deserves a future we can depend on.”
I’d settle for any non-dystopic future for my grandchildren, thank you very much. Earth Day is here again. You can’t miss it. It’s not in the league of Halloween and Christmas, but the marketing push around the environmental consciousness day is hard to miss. For the 50th anniversary of Earth Day in 2020, the burgeoning pandemic did not slow down efforts from Hyundai, Michelob, Apple, SodaStream, Yeti, Timberland, and even NASA to tap into consumers’ swelling concern about Mother Earth. And that’s fine, as long as the companies have real and significant sustainability projects to share. But they very often don’t, and we all are being splattered with greenwash.
Take Florida Power & Light, to name just one local example of the nationwide phenomenon of corporate greenwashing. It is doing better than other Florida energy providers in that it no longer relies on an oil-burning power plant—the one in the commercial—which now has been repurposed as a gas-burning facility. In December, Florida Power & Light also shut down its last coal-fired plant in Florida and converted another to gas. More than 75 percent of the company’s power generation now comes from gas. But only eight percent comes from renewables, namely solar. Florida Power & Light says they want to install 30 million solar panels by 2030, but in a place dubbed the “Sunshine State” there are questionsabout the company moving the goalposts on solar energy generation. I wouldn’t put it past them. The reason lies in some recent history.
In 2016, Florida utilities spent $20 million making the case to limit rooftop solar, almost half of which came from Florida Power & Light. It’s not so much the money spent; it is how they spent it. Consumers for Smart Solar, a fake grassroots group funded entirely by utilities and right-wing advocacy groups, pushed a measure onto the 2016 ballot that would have preserved the utilities’ monopoly and given the power companies the right to challenge any policy that favored solar power. The language of the proposed constitutional Amendment 1 was purposefully deceptive—“political jiu-jitsu” said the policy director of a conservative Koch-funded think tank. It was so deceiving that it was challenged in the courts, but in a 4-3 decision the Florida Supreme Court ruled that it wasn’t. All four Republican-appointed justices voted on the side of the utilities. In the end, it took a bigger grassroots campaign to raise awareness among voters about the real intent of Amendment 1, which was defeated only because it didn’t reach the 60 percent threshold required in Florida to change the constitution. Utilities, however, did manage to get 51 percent of the vote in favor of Amendment 1.
EDIT
https://thebulletin.org/2021/04/corporate-greenwash-stains-earth-day/
